Self-expression from conviction matures the man and makes the nation; but the pose of protagonist imposes grave responsibility. He who assumes it in writing for the public eye, on a subject vital to the security of the commonwealth, owes it to himself and to his readers to employ whatsoever he elects to be the weight of his influence against contact of extremes; to write well within knowledge, observation and experience studiously gained, and not at all scandalously. Those who write and speak otherwise, are in the way of, rather than pointing the way to, the reformation of the criminal. Quasi-billingsgate is quite reliably the chosen weapon of the cheap charlatan. "Trained criminologists," to whom our voluble friend so confidently refers, make few general statements regarding the genesis, etiology, and successive stages of crime; but they are one in the conclusion that it is first of all a most complex social-science study, not conclusively reducible to a given number and kind of prime factors. Notwithstanding, gentlemen peck diligently at "poverty" for the root of crime. Were it so, "The Jukes," the most prolific genealogical tree of pauperism of which we have record, would hardly have pushed thirty per cent of its branches up through poverty not only, but as well through the effluvia of licentiousness, alcoholism, and crime, to the sunlight of wholesome growth. It is yet true that craving want betimes aggravates the causes of crime, albeit it does not commonly initiate criminal action. From both the objective and subjective points of view, it is in a larger, deeper, and more wide-spread sense true, that the urge and surge for things for which no man has need, impel to felonious conduct. Next to bad blood--which cries for expression out of the graveyards of remote generations--the carrying power of false suggestion and example is perhaps the most potent force in unmaking men. The criminal readily educes that if a "captain of industry" may at one and the same time pick the nation's pocket and effect the garb of a lowly Jesus, the habitual thief may "tell his beads" and thereby discharge his moral obligations to society. In character, a country is as good as its supposedly best, and bad as its worst citizens, the influence of the former of whom, when employed to misdirect wealth and mislead authority, is the most pernicious menace to national character and longevity.